Trying not to think about Richard, Antonia put the leaflets in her pocket, and wandered through the rooms, which were light and spacious, polish-scented and attractively arranged. Some of the furniture looked as if it was quite valuable, and there were several displays of really beautiful old glass and chinoiserie. It’s that narrow world from another era, thought Antonia, but I find it alluring. If I came across a time machine now, what would I do? Set the dial to the 1890s, and press Start without thinking twice about it? Travel back to that narrow undemanding life? She frowned and moved on, looking at the other displays.
The old watermill she had noticed on the way here had been treated to a display all by itself. It was called Twygrist, and there was a neat little account of how farmers had brought their grain to be ground by the miller. The Miller of Twygrist. It had a faintly sinister ring, although Antonia supposed it was only on account of the grisly ogre’s chant about grinding men’s bones to make bread. Literature had not always been kind to millers, of course, depicting them as apt to sell their daughters into that peculiar servitude where the spinning of straw into gold was obligatory. Someone had drawn a careful diagram of how the Amberwood mill had worked, and rather endearingly studded it with tiny men and women in what looked like the working garb of the Victorian era.
There was no mention of Twygrist’s age, but Antonia thought it could be anywhere between the compiling of the Domesday Book and the Regency craze for fake-Gothic. However old it was, it had the appearance of having grown up by itself out of the ground when no one was looking.
But to balance that, there was a pleasing little story of how a memorial clock had been put onto Twygrist’s north wall in the opening years of the 1900s, to commemorate a Miss Thomasina Forrester, and how a tiny trust fund existed to pay for the winding and maintenance of the clock. ‘And even today,’ ran the careful lettering beneath the photographs, ‘the Forrester Clock of Twygrist is faithfully wound every Wednesday morning, and the post of Clock-Winder still exists, and is in the gift of the local council, although very much regarded as a family appointment and frequently passed from father to son.’
There again was the touch of Middle England or even Middle Earth. Clock-winders and a lady whose name might have come straight out of Beatrix Potter.
Quire House itself was documented in an orderly fashion. The precentor who had built it in the eighteenth century had, it seemed, needed a large house for his eleven children. Luxurious tastes and uxorious habits, thought Antonia. That’s another entry on the debit side of those days. No convenient birth pill or condoms on supermarket shelves, least of all for churchmen and their spouses.
She moved through to the back of the house, to a music room overlooking the gardens. As she went in, a large black cat with a white front like an evening shirt appeared from nowhere and jumped onto a spinet at the far end, regarding her with lordly indifference. ‘I suppose it was you I saw from the cottage window last night,’ said Antonia softly, and put out a tentative hand. ‘You looked like a ghost in the moonlight. There’s nothing ghostly about you today, though.’
The cat twitched an ear, leapt down from the spinet, good-manneredly accepted a caress, and vanished through the half-open French windows, leaving Antonia to walk round the room on her own.